Starting Strong
There seems to be a whole army of junior scouts buried in the barren wastelands around the starting Bunker. Much in the time-honored tradition of old-school RPGs, Caravaneer 2 seems to be quite tough on the fresh and green characters, and players. Without playing the game for you, here's some veteran advice on how to minimize chances of joining them. This is not about following quests - Game Walkthrough pages do that. This is about what you really do in a game, and that is, first, surviving, then, assembling your caravan and then, well, conquering the post-apocalyptic world! Surviving your own delivery. Well only the good Lord knows how you turned out, but I sure hope your Agility is an even number (4 agility gives you a walking speed of a donkey where 6 agility lets you run along a camel just well enough - okay, not like that will be happening any time soon), I sure hope you are not weaker then 3 just so that you could carry your own food and water around, and I sure hope you're not too dumb, pal. I mean, It's okay to be dumb actually, if you don't mind your sweet time: you could still learn everything just as well as that genius bloke, only spending thrice to fourfold on it. Well I do mind my time, so if I ever find a missus and we get over to, you know, making children into this world, I hope it turns out to something like 5/4/1/10, 3/6/1/10 or the like. Maybe 4/4/3/9. Ye ye, not that much use for accuracy these days: it only affects starting level of certain skills which you will eventually train on their own. Much later in life you will find out that hitpoints, which are directly derived from strength, are impossible to increase at all, sturdiest armors only getting you so far. While walking speed could be made moot by riding, action points derived from Agility grow very slowly with experience and largely remain tied to your stat. Anything else, well, time and practice will cover. Still wondering where's the surviving part in all this? Simple. I've seen more 1/1/x/x people someone expected to become scouts then I would like, and 2/2/x/x are not much better. Poor guys couldn't carry their bottle of water to the old chap in Silos, so yes, by professional standard these are simply stillborn. Surviving your first day in the deserts. Now you are a little overwhelmed, and rightly so: there's just so much, so much of everything. But don't be just for now. For starters, you only need to keep in mind very few but vital things: food and water. Guess what? You just have to eat and drink all the time. Same as any other guy or animal, including those in your caravan, but I'm getting ahead of myself. See that handy Settings menu accessible via rightmost of the three upper triggers on the traveling screen or from Overview in your Caravan menus? Go there, yes, right now. Find Collect Forage and Hunt triggers. First is about, oh you guessed right, collecting forage, which is a single thing caravan animals seem to eat these days. It sells for very little, so you might want it off for now. Hunting, well, is a better stuff: you pick up your food on the go. Well, for now, a small fraction of your food anyways - amount collected depends on your Hunting skill which, if you look like my dream child, is not very high yet. Still, anything helps, plus you want to train it, and for training you need practice - much as with everything else here. So enable Hunting. Almost forgot! Enable "pause when entering travel mode" while you are at it, saves you ton of hassles. I see it, pal, you're itching to ask: why not just pick up a bit of forage while we are at it? Well guess what: nothing is free in this world, even stuff literally collected from the ground. Each of these options slows you down by 5%, effectively increasing the amount of food and water needed for any given trip. And you figured right, this could be a straight bad thing if the amount collected is less then the additional amount consumed. You might want to just dally around some place for a while with both modes on to train respective skills, but that's another story. Now, food comes in many different varieties with different calorie-to-weight and calorie-to-price ratios and different tastes - never mind the latter for now, your own morale is always fine, and it's too early to worry about others. You basically want meat, because it's light and nourishing. But them blokes at the Bunker supply you only with vegs, which you have to haul whole bags of just to get a bite - but apparently, vegs are the latest trend in them underground ex-mil bases. There's also this "water content" part but I suggest you don't count on it too much: still need, well, actual water to drink! Oh, and that water, along with every other liquid (milk, as the other example you'll soon encounter), needs some container... Why does it all matter? Simple. Plot a route on your Map and look at calculations to the right. There's how much water and food you need to physically make the trip. You can go hungry or dehydrated for a short while - about half a day - then you start feeling sick, rapidly loose health and then... Okay, everyone knows what happens next - guess why you are the only Scout left in your bunker, eh? So any town-to-town trip, you start by going to the market (or your bunker's storage) and stocking up for Vital Load - the necessary food and water. You could reduce rations in Supplies tab of your Caravan menu to give you a little edge, but don't keep it like that for long: malnourishment will cause you to loose body weight, and below 85% optimal you risk getting sick, loosing the strength to carry your stuff, getting overburdened, loosing speed in the middle of nowhere, and then... Well this is the first concept you have to always keep in mind, right here. Effective safe range. Which is, how far your caravan could go at it's present speed with it's present supplies, production/hunting/foraging and consumption rates. This really bears repeating for the so-called almost fully trained scouts out there: if you don't have/find/generate enough food, water and later, with animals, forage to consume all the way to the town, you are in for a hard times. And if you cannot make it so - by increasing speed, decreasing consumption, finding or even looting more - sorry. Been nice meeting you, pal. Okay, this might be little too grim, since there is still a margin for running on fumes here. A healthy individual could go for several days with little to no food before collapsing. Hunting offsets a little food requirements but don't count on it now unless you was born with a talent - a talent dependent on sky-high both agility and accuracy, which is something I advised against earlier. Now, the water... the water is much worse. Heat and dehydration will get you in less then 24 hours, and ironically, you also cannot hunt or slaughter livestock to get it. Again, the "high water %" food helps a little, but only that. A little. However, most of anyone you encounter also carry water with them so if things are looking bad but you are still in a shape for some fighting, guess what. There are such a derivatives as "Effective safe range on water", "on food" and "on forage", and "effective emergency ranges". All of this is pretty self-explanatory. For someone not too dumb, at least. And yes, it's a kind of Liebig's law, in that only takes the scarcest of food or water. Shortages for less then half a day and down-rationing for less then a week are borderline, anything worse will make yet another unremarkable sandblasted bones out of you, promptly. Well, the sandblasting part is gonna take a good time, but that won't matter much for'ya, will it? So, now you could describe the process of stocking up for the trip as "setting your effective safe range equal to the distance to destination" and sound like a real pro already! What little remains is acting like one, pal. Free carrying capacity remaining is your "B'usiness Load'" - that's how you actually trade goods. And yes, this means the longer the trip, the less of any stuff but food and water you can take with you. Up to the point where you simply can't carry enough supplies to make it. Yes, that's the maximum one-way Potential Safe Range, where all of your carrying capacity is just for the road. Don't worry, we'll get to work on it later. And the one last thing. You might have heard of some miracles long gone, like GPS or whatnot. Well it's different times, and few people even remember something like that. What am I getting at? In the wasteland, you don't really know your location. Stray away from a pre-set direction not in view of any town, and chances are you won't ever find your way back. Not alive, by any measure. So just don't do it. If you somewhy absolutely had to, don't count on your "intuition", if there is such a thing in green scouts. Instead, open your map. When the offset is less then your sight radius, just press Go there - it will instantly orient you to correct azimuth again, let's just hope you will see your destination as you pass by. This is also why you would want to do any dedicated hunting/foraging experience roaming and/or little bit of bandit killing in close proximity of a town. Learn the "reverse route" function of your Map not just as convenience but as an emergency measure too: If for whatever reason it becomes apparent you won't make it to your destination and, by good fortune, it happens less then halfway - reversing route and pressing "go" will instantly reorient you on a shorter trip back. Which you just might cut. Now, I heard rumors of a smart guy from some distant place working on advancements in the whole positioning story... but for now we just have to work with what we got. And that seems to be a lot of guys not even knowing what azimuth is. Some of them asking about Liebig's law, imagine that! Surviving your first bandits. And some after that. Well the combat itself is fairly straightforward. Just stay clear of crossbow fire. Head-shot people at point blank, hit, run, whatever - you are the guy bringing a gun to the fist fight here. Mind your ammo: that 30 9mm cartridges you was supplied with may seem like a lot, but Merchants barely have 1-2 more in stock at a time, and that's all you gonna have until moving on to Alkubra region. So depending on the amount of fighting you fancy doing that could be well enough or really tight, I wouldn't recommend spraying bullets away just yet in any case. Now the important part which you won't find in one of them tactical manuals is that surviving combat is by far not all there is about surviving combat. The good news, you are trained in first aid bandaging techniques so there's no danger of bleeding out outside combat. Plus unless you Lord knows why turned on "advanced FUBAR enabler", that is, trading, the world itself will actively prevent you from taking more loot then you could carry (overburdening oneself, loosing speed, eating through your supplies before making it). The bad news are that the good news end there. If you was already malnourished/dehydrated somewhat, combat injuries could cause your health to drop below penalty levels. These penalties come to carrying capacity and speed, both of which could cause reaching safe town impossible. In other words, reduce your effective safe distance. If you are simply overburdened, immediately drop excess load down to the bare food/water needed for the rest of the trip, and you could still make it. If, however, you take a speed penalty and simply don't have enough water... well then I just wasted a hell of a lot time trying to talk sense into yet another dead man, didn't I? Taking a prisoner without paying a second thought to it might just kill you outright: his low speed could instantly slow your whole caravan down to where your supplies are not enough. Worse yet: as prisoners tend to be heavily injured, it's basically the norm for them to have stats (and speed) penalty. Prisoners also eat and drink, what a bastards! - and communal sharing your limited food with them easily ends up with all of your starved bodies in a communal grave. That is, unless you use Prisoners screen of Supplies tab to enable a special ration. You could set it to "sand and dust" if you fancy but then why you bothered taking prisoners to begin with? And even worse yet: injuries plus malnourishment simultaneously cause very rapid health and stats drop, with speed dropping, your caravan slowing down... you get where this is headed, right? Pretty much the same goes for hiring mercenaries, including those from the very same prisoners. No idea why anyone would do that - prisoners normally have negative attitude towards you, contrary to neutral and positive of tribal mercs, pretty much guaranteeing bad salary-to-stats-and-skills rations - but nothing stops them fresh people from keeping on trying! Besides, all the armor, weapons and even ammo also have to be, surprise, carried. So equipping something big and heavy for a bit of easier time with them bandits starts hurting your economy and, in tight cases, survival far and long from the actual battlefield. See, we're starting to talk economy now, so things are definitely getting brighter! Surviving your first week, moving on from the surviving business to actual business. Earlier on I treated you like a totally green kid you are. Now I see that Olaf had trained you well. But you still have much to learn, my young apprentice... So I'll get all professional on your ass. Let's expand on the whole ranges, weights and carrying capacities thing now so that you could travel, quest and trade safely and profitably. Effective safe range = (speed) x (time you can survive on the road) (time you can survive on the road) = (amount of resources a.k.a. Vital Load) / (consumption rate - production/gathering rate) This is not a rocket science, really, but it does use multiple variables you can, and will, affect. So you'd better get used to it as soon as possible, pal. Speed is the easiest part to grasp: it is equal to the slowest walking thing in your caravan, minus 5% for enabled hunting/forage collection each. Notice how I said walking thing, not just any thing? Consumption rate comes a close second. You instantly know overall daily calorie and water rates just looking at Supplies tab, in Crew tab it says how much any single person needs, and individual animal needs are in their description anywhere you could see it. Calories come from food and animals drink their water and eat their forage raw. Interesting thing is, humans get some of their water from food they eat, calculated by an obscure, secret and unnecessary complicated formula of (food weight) x (water %). Where would you be without me, eh? Probably wondering at the whole rationing thing under Supplies tab, I guess. Well don't waste your time, pal. It's an emergency measure, not something you want to touch often. When you really need to extend, a healthy person, that is, starting well-fed at or above ideal weight, could go for a couple of weeks on less food and for a couple of days on less water. Trim out some fat, you know. Assuming you had some to begin with. If not, like when trying to go low-rations for long... Well, my condolences. Death of emaciation in the middle of nowhere is a rather horrible way to go. Production/gathering rate takes different forms for different resources. Animals produce appropriate kinds of milk, which is nourishing and, like, 90% water. Collecting and Hunting gathers forage / assorted foodstuffs according to Collecting / Hunting skills. The exact amounts are hard to predict, but easy to see with experiment (assume 0 production in stocking up and then divide leftovers by time on the road). Now compare the result with 5% speed drop and decide, keeping in mind that active skills will get better over time. Practically speaking, aside from the fact you will reeeeally want female animals in your caravan over male ones, this is the part where you don't have much maneuver and much to calculate and recalculate on a regular basis. Present amount of resources (a.k.a. Vital Load) equals their weight straight up with forage, but gets a little trickier with calories and water. I already said how some of your water is hidden in your food. Calories do not translate into weight directly, too. An additional layer of advanced professional knowledge should be applied, in the form of (calories) = (weight) x (calories per kilo). Besides, a poor bloke just like you, running around on his first errands, should also pay attention to calories per price ratio. In layman's terms, you want milk with caloricity of a jerky and price of a sand. Or a jerky with water content... good luck finding either! Hint: being able to calculate calories per price without my help is a step in the right direction. From now on, we will call the whole bulk of supplies needed to get you, with all your consumptions, productions and speed, from point A to point B - that is, to have and effective safe range from A to B - you Vital Load from A to B. If you really are as smart as I hope, you would already figure that "buying your Vital Load from A to B" sounds even more professional the "setting your effective safe range", while meaning the same thing. Don't get worried just yet, most of the hard math you will do instinctively on the Map screen when plotting a route. A thing of notice is that instinct won't count water in your foods as "water available". But as I already said, effective emergency range on water is the tightest thing all else starting equal, so consider this a bit of a safety net and don't over-think. Worth mentioning right here that you need containers to carry liquids around, and containers have their own weight too. Well for starters you just want enough to have your potential safe range on water go all the way between tribal camps. To carry your Vital Load of water 'between them, getting it? So why does it all matter so much? I mean, aside from the obvious "dying without food and water in the middle of nowhere" thing? You should have guessed already! Here's yet another sophisticated piece of math for you: ('Maximum load) = (Fixed Load) + (Vital Load) + (Business Load) Yeah, that's all there is. Or not? Fixed Load '''is your weapons, armor, containers, carts, everything you carry around whether you have to or like to. '''Maximum load is the combined carrying power of everything you got walking or rolling, aside from prisoners. Lazy bastards would rather dehydrate then carry their own water. The final number is right at the bottom, in plain view. So it wasn't all, after all. We're just getting to the crux of it: (Business Load) = (Maximum load) - (Fixed Load) - (Vital Load) And Business Load is what the hassle is about. How much trade goods you could move from A to B without the risk of dying on the road. At least without "outside interference", I mean. More goods = more profit, unless you are trading at a loss. Which I sure hope you don't. Mind you, liquid trading goods are going to need containers just as much as your water and milk. Might be little overwhelming at first but it all just fits in nicely once you get a grip, and you really should if you are to survive and prosper. Longer trip - more Vital Load - less Business Load. Business Load comes to 0 at a given distance? Well that's your maximum safe range at present configuration. Just found heavier weapons/armor then you don't seem to really need in your battles? Well they increase Fixed Load and therefore reduce Business Load, might want to sell. Slowing down for whatever reason? Well the time you have to survive on the road goes up, which typically means necessary Vital Load goes up. Got a herd of mammals pumping out more milk then you can eat? Well your Vital Load on food just gone negative, indicating net production over time - one less thing to worry about. And so on, and so on. Not only survival but most of economical decisions you'll make are going to be based off such logic. Armed with this knowledge, and a little bit of cash, you are no more in danger of just vanishing in the deserts. So it's a right time to start talking about that cash part. Working for food and board. Just kidding, you don't seem to need board.